Geek Opus II: Windows Sux

At least I don't try to claim that Windows is a magic or superior OS. ;)

Here's the sit: The Toshiba notebook 'puter I used for years died this past spring. Must've been a motherboard issue, or something. It had behaved oddly for a few months on-and-off before the final death throes, and I knew there was likely some hardware issue going on... I just didn't have the money to do anything about it. A desktop, I'd fearlessly tear apart and swap a lot of thangs from my ample pile of spare parts, if I had what I needed. But a notebook? Fuhgeddabouddit.

The last day Toshi had power applied to it, it would boot, but would not allow me to log in -- certain characters simply would not be input via its keyboard, nor by an external keyboard, and so I could not enter the user account password.

So, I removed and stored its HDD, hoping to someday soon be able to retrieve the data thereon, and recycled the remaining carcass of Toshi that day.

Dr. GWPDA (praised be her name!) took up a collection, and sent me the very nice Compaq V2000 notebook that I'm using today. I had a grand scheme in muh haidbone that involved my creating a Kanotix (Linux) bootable CD (check -- very cool, compact OS, btw), removing the V2000's HDD, replacing it with Toshi's HDD, and booting into Kanotix to try to copy the files off the old HDD onto a big ol' USB external HDD that I have (Kanotix even recognized and mounted my big ol' USB external HDD, no muss, no fuss! How cool is that?). As luck would have it, the physical IDE interfaces of the drives were different (the V2000's is much cooler, btw -- no tools required to swap out its HDD). So, Strike One.

Now, we come to today: Halloween, 2006. A week from Erection Day.

Very cool new guy to my blog 'hood, GeorgeM , shipped me an inexpensive USB enclosure for 2.5" HDDs (very awesome -- thank you!). The V2000 didn't wanna recognize it, even with the driver CD, so I connected it to my desktop. Hey, WinXP recognizes it, installs a driver, and life is good! I open up an explorer window, start down the directory tree...

Then, Strike Two.

That's right -- the user account folder from the Toshi HDD, "oz" (an old handle I used when I first got Toshi) is not accessible. "Access is denied." Flyin' eat me. Every gotdamned other folder on the drive is fine, wide-open... except the one fuckin' folder that has any fuckin' thang I could conceivably want to recover on it. Can't explore it, can't copy it, can't do jack fuckin' shit with it. Mother. Fletcher.

Hmmm. Okay -- let's puzzle this out. It's raining, so I can't go poke the 'net for ideers (given that my WiFi signal is zero in the condo these days, so it's 'Stangtop-only for getting on the 'net). Obviously, there's some permissions issue, eh? Well, checking the properties and dicking with sharing/security on the folder yields no joy... nor does the Disk Management component of the MMC. Foo-yock, Mr. Spock.

Hey! I know! Maybe if I set up an "oz" user account with sysadmin privs on the desktop (hell, I even recall the password I had on Toshi, so I'll set it up identically to Toshi). Um... okay, did that. "Access is denied." Strike Three.

Okay... how 'bout booting the desktop to Kanotix, and see if we can poke around the HDD from there (probably not, but gotta give it a try)? Easy enough, you'd think... but you'd be wrong. :) For whatever reason, the boot order that's shown in BIOS is being ignored on this piece-of-shit eMachines desktop piece-of-fucking-shit. And now, I can't even get the piece-of-shit motherfucker to go into BIOS. Arrrgh! Strike Fuckin' Four -- I give the fuck up... for now.

If any geeks wanna offer up suggestions, I'm all ears. :)
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